A 48V to 50-110V Resonant Power-Bus Charger with Reduced Conduction Loss for MHz-Frequency Long-Range LiDAR Driver

The paper presents a novel power-supply bus charger for Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) driver systems in automotive applications. The charger utilizes a proposed synchronous resonant boost topology that responds swiftly to rapid drops in the power bus voltage during periodic laser pulse emission. In contrast to conventional hard-charging-based bus chargers, this approach eliminates hard-charging losses while maintaining robust output level regulation. This technique improves LiDAR driving efficiency across a wide supply bus range, ensuring the generation of high-amplitude, narrow-width pulses. Experimental results with a 48-V input confirm that the proposed design can regulate an output from 50V to 110V. When supplying a 100V bus, the charger attains a 250-ns bus recovery time while supporting a peak driving current of 49A with 2-ns pulse-width for the laser diode, enabling LiDAR emission frequencies to exceed the MHz-level. In addition, measured results demonstrate a significant reduction in overall system power consumption, from 10.2W to 5.09W, compared to the hard-charging-based approach.